Issue # 1
All The Good Times Are Past And Gone
Hello!
Welcome to the first issue of my newsletter. I’m not going to spend a lot of time introducing this thing because I get annoyed with that — we’ll mostly just let the newsletter speak for itself. Suffice it to say, this space will be a way for me, a touring bluegrass musician, to share my experiences and thoughts from the road (and at home), while also letting me, as an inveterate reader of books and listener of music as well as a burgeoning watcher of TV and movies, to give my opinions on said bits of culture — holding forth, bloviating, and so on. Mostly it’s just a way for me to set down on paper (or screen) the thoughts I work through as I catalogue my obsessions. If you like the sound of that, welcome aboard! If not, I don’t blame you.
Ok. On with it.
WHERE I’VE BEEN PLAYING
I played a couple of small shows with Special Consensus (specialc.com) this past weekend — one in Valparaiso, IN, and one in Lombard, IL. These were the first shows of 2022 and they just made me all the more ready for touring season to begin in earnest this year. We’re still very much dealing with the effects of the pandemic, with a significant chunk of shows canceled in January, so the next dates we have are on the second weekend in February. Again, one is in Indiana and the other is in Illinois. Hopefully the weather is a bit better for those - this past weekend’s show were icier than an ex-wife at a will-reading in a murder mystery.
WHAT I’M LISTENING TO
David Grisman is the reason I fell in love with the mandolin, and he has had an incalculable influence on both my playing and my approach to music. He’s such an inspiring musical figure in so many ways with his teaching, producing, engineering, record label-owning, archiving, and more. But when I was really listening to him the most was when I was much younger — early and mid-teens. At that time, my listening was much more passive/intuitive than it is now: I never learned a solo note-for-note from a record and certainly wasn’t transcribing anything, instead approaching things in a more intuitive way. And though that’s still my nature, I’ve made a concerted effort over the past couple of years to slow things down and become more intentional with my approach to how I’m learning tunes and solos, including learning to transcribe. I’ve been able to notice a clear difference in my playing from doing so and recommend it to anyone who is serious about taking their playing to the next level.
Anywayyyyy, one of my goals/plans/resolutions for this new year is to begin working my way through all of Grisman’s recorded work in this more attentive way. His discography is so extensive that there isn’t going to be any shortage of material anytime soon. Anyway, the rough plan is an album a week, and I’ll share my thoughts, impressions, analysis, and the occasional transcription here. Maybe we’ll call it “Dawg Studies” or something.
The record I’m starting with is Grisman’s 2003 bluegrass release “Life of Sorrow.” This album is a collection of recordings made in about a 30-year span with various different collaborators, such as the Del McCoury Band, the Nashville Bluegrass Band, John Hartford, Ralph Stanley, Mac Wiseman, and others. As the title would suggest, all the songs on the album are pretty lonesome, or “share common threads of human trials and tribulations,” as Grisman puts it in the album’s liner notes. The choices of material and the performances are all excellent, as you would expect.
Of particular interest to me were the two banjo/mando duets, one with NBB’s Alan O’Bryant and the other with John Hartford. Banjo and mandolin isn’t a configuration you hear very often, but both of these are great, and make me wish that there were more of them. (Side note: did you know Hartford played fiddle with Old & In the Way some before Vassar joined the band? Crazy. I’d pay dearly to hear a recording of that.) The duets with just Mac and Dawg are also excellent, with Mac’s distinctive guitar playing serving as the perfect complement to Grisman’s tasteful melodic experimentation. Makes me wish there was a whole album of that! There’s a weird and/but cool track recorded in ‘69 with John Nagy, the bassist for Earth Opera (the issue of this newsletter on that album will be a fun one) singing a ethereal version of the old ballad “Pretty Saro,” accompanied by Grisman and…a string section. It’s cool though. There’s also a 5-minute version of the traditional hymn “Farther Along” with autoharp and mandolin. Both of these feel a little out of place on the album but both are musically interesting, so I’m glad they’re here. You rarely get to hear the mandolin in those contexts. Also check out Grisman’s vocal duet with Ralph Stanley on “Man On of Constant Sorrow.” Yeah.
The two mando solos I’ll point you to are the solo on the title track with the NBB and the twin/trade-off stuff he does with Ronnie on “Cabin of Love” with the Del McCoury Band.
Grisman is known probably most for his Dawg jazz fusion stuff but God, he’s such a great bluegrass player. That chop, that tone, the weird rhythm, the tremolo, the bluesy, funky stuff, the mastery of melody — it’s all the perfect combination in my opinion and it’s on fine display in this collection.
WHAT I’M READING
I finished Moby-Dick! It was great, although not easy. I started on November 14th, and finished January 7th, so it took almost two months for 625 pages in the Penguin edition with a break in the middle to read some other stuff. The plot gets pretty thin in the middle, and instead you’re treated to lots of talk about whales, whaling ships, whaling equipment, whaling lore, etc., which is weird and cool and interesting, but isn’t as much of an engine driving you along as the beginning and end of the book are.
The two things I loved most about the novel were:
1) Obsession — I’m a sucker for anyone obsessed with anything, and this is an author obsessed with his novel (and whales), a narrator obsessed with his captain (and whales), and a captain obsessed with one whale in particular — Moby Dick. The novel is kind of an intense fever dream from which you wake up at the end (or come up for air…) and think: “My God, how did I just spend 600+ pages reading about whales!?” It feels a bit like an alternate reality. Also, I have watched no less than three YouTube videos about whales now. Let’s hope this stays within reason.
2) The language — majestic, grand, out of control, rich, allusive, elusive. My favorite thing Melville does is start with something commonplace, like something on a whale-ship, and talk about it at length until your eyes start to glaze over just a bit, and then hurl that thing to and importance of cosmic proportions in one sentence and leave you there thinking “Wait, what!?!”
There are a few excellent passages in chapter 96, “The Try-Works,” which I’ll share here. They’re kind of long, so you can, you know, scroll if you’d rather. In this chapter, the sailors/whalemen are gathered around the try-works, which is basically the way the oil is separated from the blubber by being boiled out of it in huge pots. Melville gives us a fantastic picture of this happening in one very long and very dramatic sentence:
“As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace; as to and fro, in their front, the harpooneers wildly gesticulated with their huge pronged forks and dippers; as the wind howled on, and the sea leaped, and the ship groaned and dived, and yet steadfastly shot her red hell further and further into the blackness of the sea and the night, and scornfully champed the white bone in her mouth, and viciously spat round her on all sides; then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.”
How about THAT!!!
Later in the chapter, the narrator, Ishmael, falls asleep after staring into the fire and wakes up disoriented. He then immediately goes cosmic, saying:
“Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not they back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly. To-morrow, in the natural sun, the skies will be bright; those who glared like devils in the forking flames, the morn will show in far other, at least gentler, relief; the glorious, golden, glad sun, the only true lamp—all others but liars!”
The idea basically is that we should get comfortable with the darkness that naturally occurs in our lives, for it will be followed by times of light, and if not, at least the darkness is something real — a comforting sentiment, probably true, and in any case put beautifully in the last few lines of the chapter, perhaps my favorite passage of the novel:
“And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.”
Breaking news here: Moby-Dick is great and you should read it sometime. Just be patient with it and be ready to go along for the ride.
This was the last novel of three that I set out to read in October of 2020: Middlemarch by George Eliot, Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and Moby-Dick. These are pretty much generally accepted as the three great large social-realist English-language novels of the mid-nineteenth century (feel free to @ me if you think I’m wrong), and I wanted to read them and see what I thought about them. I’m still thinking about them, so probably more on this next week, but my initial ranking is probably:
Bleak House
Moby-Dick
Middlemarch
Yeah. More on that next week.
I also finished a memoir about reading that was pretty good, called The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life, by Andy Miller (co-host of the excellent “Backlisted” podcast). It wasn’t great, but it was good, and it was about reading and lists, so I enjoyed it. If you’re interested, go listen to the podcast — it’s about old “backlisted” books — and if you like it, read Miller’s book.
Books finished so far this year: 2
WHAT I’M WATCHING
I’m working my way through the Marvel movies, the vast majority of which I hadn’t seen before the past few months. I’m watching in order of release date, and am now through Phase One, and into Phase Two, just finishing Captain America: Winter Soldier. I thought it was great! A superhero political spy-thriller that really worked for me. Cap is not my favorite superhero (I think that’s probably Daredevil), but his first two movies have been my favorites of all the Marvel movies I’ve seen so far. Maybe because they raise interesting questions about America? Maybe because they’re less…superhero-ey? Anyhow, I liked it, and thought the final scenes with The Winter Soldier were very touching. Maybe I like Captain America’s movies (so far) because they aren’t as macho as some of the other films.
I started the next movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, and….wow. We’re in left field now, baby. Talking raccoons, a tree person thing, different worlds — but it seems deliciously insane and fun. I’ll probably let you know next week.
Thanks for reading!
— Michael